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Open Source AMD Driver Now Supports OpenGL 3.3 — and It's Getting Faster
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest open source Linux code published today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver supports OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 1.50; this is the open source Linux graphics driver used for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, including the new Hawaii GPUs. The OpenGL 3.3 support appeared in patches spread across Mesa and LLVM that should appear in their next releases. It was also found that the RadeonSI driver is becoming a lot faster and starting to compete with Catalyst, AMD's notorious Linux binary driver."
And 3.3 is very old. This is embarrassing for AMD.
Why not start working on 4.0 instead of older versions?
Not content with his self referential, self saucing pudding of a site Phoronix, Michael Larabel has taken to posting anonymously on Slashdot!
And you can't do shit without the firmware...
Fuck a duck they are setting the bar pretty low if their goal is to compete with AMDs Catalyst Drivers, the official AMD Drivers on both Windows & Linux are junk.
AMD should be ashamed of their official drivers, you would think after all these years they would have got a grip of their developers & started to produce some decent reliable drivers but alas this is not the case you have to manually delete files when removing the drivers as the drivers are too fucking dumb to remember where they installed files & on Linux you have to recompile the drivers every time the wind changes direction with kernel updates or xorg updates etc which is like an exercise in pulling teeth.
If you want to do any proper number crunching stuff with your AMD/Ati card the open source drivers aint worth a wank & you're forced to use the crapware official Catalyst Drivers & Associated Extras.
There is a long long way to go before AMD cards will have decent fully functioning open source drivers, but that's not to say there isn't good work being done by developers because there is but AMD & Nvidia both needs to take a large portion of blame with how obstructive they are in holding back open source drivers, which is a shame because both vendors officials drivers produced by their own devs are utter junk in many areas.
The hilarious thing about Phoronix benchmarks comes together on the last page, where under the graph showing gallium3d and catalyst tied in fumark gpu testing the explication casually tossed was "The Furmark rendering on RadeonSI Gallium3D wasn't correct compared to Catalyst"
What is the point of showing *big improvements in speed* if you don't compare rendering accuracy? They do wrong things much faster than before?
I'm amused that this is still even an issue.
AFAICT, the state of the art of open Linux video drivers hasn't actually advanced, in the relative scheme of things in at least fifteen years: Things still just barely work, doing somewhat new things, at best.
(Oh, sure: The desktop can be stable...sometimes. But I had a stable...sometimes desktop in 1999, too.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Looking at those graphs, for those games, the current open source driver is running above the refresh rate of most monitors.
So while the catalyst driver may be faster, in some cases doubling the frame rate, I highly doubt you'd actually notice the difference.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I was surpriced how well radeon driver is working. I'm not even using the newest version, but still the driver works considerably better on opengl use cases than it did just few years ago.
It's a good start, but there's a long way to go.
It was also found that the RadeonSI driver is becoming a lot faster and starting to compete with Catalyst
If it is just starting to compete with Catalyst, then it is still unusable. I installed Mint 16 Petra recently on this machine. I used the binary AMD driver (for a Radeon HD 6870), and the video performance was terrible. Sure, everything looked and functioned properly (no crashes or weird artifacts as other ACs are experiencing), but it was slow as dirt! Not only that, but the fan was cranked up and the card was putting off way more heat than it should while idle! What in the actual fuck are you doing, AMD?
What impact does this have on mining Scrypt based coins using AMD GPUs?
Not much, if any. You will already get better performance GPU mining with Linux than with Windows. You'll use OpenCL, not OpenGL, so improvements to OpenGL do not help.
Starting a new software project (esp. game) it costs nothing extra to ensure it runs on all the major platforms.
I don't see how that's the case. It costs a lot of overhead money to target the major consoles. Console makers have been more interested in poaching established studios from other platforms than in nurturing startups. And until very recently, an indie studio had to lease a dedicated office rather than operating out of the developers' homes. OUYA is more open than the other consoles of its generation, with an API familiar to Android app developers and official sideloading, but it appears to have fizzled. What makes Steam Machine, the other open console of this generation, less likely to fizzle than OUYA?
Not everyone who wants to (or has to) use Linux has sixteen years of experience administering Linux machines.
It's easy for a beginner to get something wrong when setting up a Linux machine which will prevent X from starting properly. With nothing on screen that says "click here to fix problems", a beginner will have to use another machine to search the internet for help. Meanwhile that first machine is rendered non-functional until the GUI is revived. It might as well be a brick.
And when a beginner searching for clues encounters attitudes like the one you're displaying there, that beginner is likely to say "oh to hell with this, I'm going back to Windows", or "never mind, I'll just get a Mac". And then the problem is you, too.